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Some social scientists use the comparative method to develop a scientific inquiry. For others, however, ‘thinking with comparisons’ is an integral part of analysing specific social and political phenomenon.

Swanson for example, feels that ‘thinking without comparisons is unthinkable’. ‘No one’, he points out, ‘should be surprised that comparisons, implicit and explicit, pervade the work of social scientists and have done so from the beginning: comparisons among roles, organisations, communities, institutions, societies, and cultures’.

Emile Durkheim, the renowned German Sociologist affirms that the comparative method enables research to ‘cease to be purely descriptive’. Even descriptions, however, points out Smelser, cannot work without comparisons. Simple descriptive words like ‘densely populated’ and ‘democratic’, he substantiates, ‘presuppose a universe of situations that are more or less populated or more or less democratic’ and one situation can be stated described only in relation comparison to the other.

It is this ‘presupposition of a universe’ in which a descriptive category can be placed, within a set of relationships, helps us to analyse it better, feel quite a number of scholars. Manoranjan Mohanty therefore seeks to emphasise relationships rather than looking merely for similarities and dissimilarities among phenomena.

The latter or the ‘compare and contrast approach’ as he calls it would ultimately become ‘an exercise in dichotomisation, an act of polarising’. In other words, such an exercise would lead to classification of likes in groups of isolated compartments so that a comparative exercise would become nothing more than finding similarities within groups and dissimilarities among them.

For the identification of relationships of unity and opposition, one must modify one’s questions. This would mean that the questions asked should not be such as to bring out answers locating merely similarities and dissimilarities but ‘the relationship which exists between them’. Only then shall one be able to understand the comparability of political systems like the United States of America (U.S.A) and United Kingdom (U.K), for instance which differ in their forms of government (Presidential and Cabinet forms, respectively).

The need to look for relationships rather than only indicators of similarity and dissimilarity is also asserted by Smelser feels that often a comparative exercise ends up looking for reasons only for differences or ‘dissimilarities’ and gives explanations which are often ‘distortions’.

The fascination or preoccupation with the ‘new’ and the ‘unique’, in other words, what is seen as different from the rest, has always ‘been part of human nature. Historically there has been a tendency to either praise these differences as ‘pure’ remainders of a previous age or see them as deviations from what is seen as normal behavior.

Thus, the emphasis on similarities and differences may lead to similarities or uniformities being seen as norms and dissimilarities and variations as ‘deviations’ from the norm. The explanations offered for such deviations might not only be distortions’ but often lead to categorisations or classifications of categories in terms of binary oppositions, hierarchies or even in terms of the ideal (good) and deviant (bad).

Often, in a system of unequal relationships, the attribution of differences and their reasons, results in the justification of the disempowerment of groups seen as different. We have seen in the history of colonialism that the colonised were deprived of freedom and the right to self governance.

The colonising nation sought to justify this deprivation by describing the subject population as being incapable of self rule because it had different social structures and religious beliefs.

The location of difference here came from the vantage point of power – that of the colonising nations while the colonising British were seen as having reached a stage of modernisation, the colonised Indians were seen to exist in a state of time lessens, in other words trapped in a backward past. Historically, we have lived in a world which is marked by what Eric Wolf calls ‘interconnections’.

Thus the appeal to look for relationships is lent weight by Eric Wolf, whose work corrects the notion that the destiny of nations has historically been shaped by European nations while the others were merely quiet spectators. Wolf shows that historically interconnections have been and continue to be a fact in the lives of states and nations.